Power overwhelming - and very, very attractive!
When we first looked at the 5970 card back in Issue 107, it was a gigantic roaring beast with performance that quite frankly scared us a little. It was so fast that it broke our performance graphs, sending Designer_Dave spiralling further and further into madness and spurring a rethink of our testing regime. While the hardware platform hasn't changed (we still use an ASUS Maximus II Extreme alongside an Intel Core i7 965 at 3.2GHz), the settings have been boosted considerably. Crysis is run at 2560x1600 at high, GRID at 2560x1600 on ultra high with 8xAA, and both the 3DMark benchmarks remain at standard settings (so you can still compare these two scores with previous reviews).
These kinds of settings are practically essential for testing a card like this; the tech specs alone usually leave you breathless and weak at the knees. Essentially double a 5870, there are two RV870 cores manufactured on a 40nm process that each boast 1600 shader units, giving a total brainpower of 3200 units. There's one gigabyte of GDDR5 memory available to each core, which is mirrored - they don't add up to a total of 2GB. The TDP of this card sits at 294W, and power is supplied via a six and an eight pin PCIe connector.
Externally the card is pretty freakin' massive, and stretches well over the edge of a standard ATX mobo. It's encased in a carbon fibre-esque shell, complete with a single red racing stripe down the middle and a bright red acrylic 'ATI Radeon' badge along the top. It's very flashy, but if you've got it, you might as well flaunt it. A single squirrel-cage fan at the end of the card sucks in cool air, passing it through the heatsinks within and venting completely outside the rear of the case - with enough heat generated to almost cook a chicken. While half of the expansion bracket is devoted to venting, the other half sports two DVI connectors and a mini DisplayPort, great for those who need multiple screens.
Performance is the ultimate end to a card like this, and it's certainly no slouch. Compared to the Manli 5870 from Issue 109, the ASUS 5970 boasts an impressive 47 per cent per cent performance increase in average GRID fps, though Crysis' average frames increased by only 16 per cent. 3DMark06 saw a teensy-tiny rise of 547 points, hindered significantly by the processor speed of our test platform. Vantage shows an impressive boost however, rising 4840 points, giving it a 29 per cent increase in performance.
While the scaling isn't perfect at all times, the best part about the 5970 is that frames stayed above 60 in GRID. If you're gaming at high resolutions, even when running antialiasing on top of high settings, this really is a powerhouse of a card. If the performance wasn't enough, ASUS has also thrown in a copy of DiRT 2 to show off DX11 in all its glory, a great inclusion of a very recent game.
In all you'll wind up paying roughly $70 more for the ASUS variant of the 5970 on the market, but it's a price we'd willingly pay to get this kind of speed.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012